[lbo-talk] Tony Judt on the death of liberalism in America

[Dennis Perrin]

> Berman: I went about it in the spirit that I hope would be with any
> journalist – I called it as I saw it. As for the Leninist nature of
> the Sandanistan front – here I can only laugh at myself because I had
> to spend a year reading through Sandanistan doctrines before I could
> look up from my desk and say with great simplicity, "Ah ha! They're
> Marxist-Leninists!" And it was really just simple as can be that
> Sandanismo, in the version of the 1970s and '80s, consisted just of
> some creative linguistic adaptations of traditional Fidelista notions,
> rhetorical alterations of some very traditional terms. Rhetorical
> alterations that deceived a lot of people and deceived a lot of
> Nicaraguans into imagining that the Sandanistan front that was a
> social democratic organization. But it wasn't.

This is just bullshit. Where to start? How about the fact that the 
Sandinistas didn't murder their internal opposition (the Miskitos were 
another, awful matter, one that was recognized and condemned by many 
pro-FSLNers I knew or read), indeed, in the case of La Prensa, allowed 
articles that called for the violent overthrow of the Sandinista govt. And 
then there's the little case of La Prensa receiving money from the country 
that financed and directed terrorist attacks on the rural population. Think 
Fidel woulda gone this far? Plus, the Sandinista Front promised and 
delivered elections when they said they would, and in the 1990 election, 
were defeated by Violeta Chamorro's UNO, another US-backed effort, and did 
nothing to prevent her from taking power. In fact, the Sandinistas were so 
open in the face of superpower aggression that it really boggles the mind, 
and they were much more democratic than many US administrations. (Compare 
their wartime actions to Woodrow Wilson during WWI and the Red Scare.) Of 
course, the inevitable happened, no doubt making freedom-lovers like Berman 
extremely happy.

When I debated Berman right after the '90 elections, he tried to pass off 
much of the contra army as a legitimate peasant uprising against an 
entrenched Stalinist state. Naturally, when I corrected this insane 
depiction of political reality (a peasant army controlled Nicaraguan 
airspace, using US aircraft? How creative!), he dismissed me as a Sandinista 
apologist, but in a nice way, with a smile. Good ol' Paul!

The funny thing is that the Sandinistas were, in most cases, exactly what 
these "libertarian" socialists could ever hope for, especially given the 
violent conditions they operated under. That they're derided for not living 
up to some existential radical concept held by those whose homes weren't 
being burned to the ground and their families shot by foreign-backed 
terrorists tells us more about the armchair crowd than those who saw the 
shit face first. That Berman adopts such purist postures at this late date 
doesn't surprise, given his apologetics for imperial violence.

Dennis